


Keepsake

by DGCatAniSiri



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-02-06 05:44:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1846537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DGCatAniSiri/pseuds/DGCatAniSiri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Liara loved Shepard. Shepard didn't return her feelings. But she still managed to walk away from the final push on Earth with a way to pretend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keepsake

**Author's Note:**

> Let me state this before the story starts: I do not actually see Liara doing this, at the very least with a Shepard who didn't romance her. But I had the plot bunny and it demanded I chase it down.

She wouldn’t remember the fights until she was much older, centuries later. But once she did, they came with perfect clarity, as if she’d been a part of the arguments herself, rather than a passive observer.

“How could you do that to him? He trusted you, Liara! You were his friend!”

“That is why I did it, Kaidan! We all knew that he wasn’t likely to come back from the assault. I couldn’t... I couldn’t bear to lose him. Not again.”

“And you think I could? You knew that we’d only just managed to get together, after three years of dancing around it. You knew that we loved each other.”

“I know, Kaidan. I was always aware of that. Painfully aware.”

“Is that what this was? You couldn’t take the fact that he didn’t love you, you had to find some way to delude yourself that there was a way you could have been together?”

“Kaidan...!”

“Tell me I’m wrong, Liara. You made no secret that you were in love with Shepard, and he made no secret of the fact that he didn’t return your feelings. Tell me that this wasn’t your way of letting yourself pretend you and Shepard had something more!” A long silence. “I thought as much.” A rustling of items. “Liara, don’t contact me again. I don’t ever want to hear from you ever again.”

“I... I understand.”

***

Years passed. She aged. She grew. When her mother took her to reunions of her mother’s friends on the Citadel, she did notice a chill in the air towards her mother, though. Aunt Tali didn’t give her mother a hug, despite giving one to Uncle James and Aunt Sam and Miss Miranda. But she really didn’t notice it until she chased a ball tossed by Jen Taylor that bounced towards where Uncle Garrus and Uncle James were talking.

“Have you heard from Kaidan recently?” Uncle Garrus asked.

“Yeah. He’s on the Citadel. Sounded like he was waiting until Liara leaves to show up here. Asked me to call him when she did, anyway, so I figured that was his plan.”

“Hmph. Can’t say I blame him.” 

She didn’t understand. She knew that she had one more uncle, who she hadn’t met in person, Uncle Kaidan, who her mother had pointed out to her when he appeared on vids or in the pictures that were passed around. But her mama had always said he’d been busy or unavailable during these reunions and couldn’t make it. Uncle James and Uncle Garrus were talking about him like he was intentionally staying away and her mama was part of why.

“I know what you mean, Scars. I’d always liked Liara well enough, but when I heard about what she did... I gotta admit, I was pissed. Especially on his behalf. Both of ‘em, actually.”

“I expected better of her. I heard her talking with him before the final push, and she talked about what she was doing, saying that it was something that friends did. It sounded like bull-”

She accidentally bumped into the ball, sending it rolling towards Uncle Garrus and Uncle James. They turned to see her listening from the doorway. Their faces went to that smile that adults give when they’re interrupted during a conversation they don’t want whoever was listening in on hearing.

“Hey, ponchita,” Uncle James said, scooping her up. “How’re you doin’?”

“She’s getting so big,” Uncle Garrus added. She recognized that they weren’t going to talk about whatever they had been before as long as they knew she was there.

***

It was another few years before she finally met Uncle Kaidan, and it was entirely unintentional. 

Mama had brought her to the Citadel. They were having a mother-daughter outing, though mama was likely to call it a ‘xeno-sociological observation,’ just to make it sound all professional. That was the asari way, to always dress up their activities in grandiose titles. She was only a child, but she was already determined not to do that herself, and that she would stick to that promise, that it was not some maiden stage whim.

As they approached an elevator, it slid open, revealing a human man in Spectre armor.

“Kaidan!”

His eyes narrowed. “Doctor T’Soni.” He looked from mama to her, and, after a moment his gaze seemed to soften. For a moment, it looked like he was having trouble breathing, but before she could ask about it, it evened out and steadied, getting her to put it out of her mind.

Placing a hand on her shoulder, mama looked to him. “Kaidan, this is my daughter.”

“So I gathered.” Although the words to mama were harsh, Kaidan’s gaze was still soft upon her. She gathered that there was some problem between the two adults, but that mama understood his anger and he was trying not to let it spill over to her. “I’m Kaidan Alenko. I suppose you haven’t heard much about me.”

“She’s been to every reunion with me. I have made sure that she’s aware of you.”

“My mom has talked about you on occasion, Spectre Alenko.”

He winced at the formality of the title. “Actually, I’m retired now. Just signed my last piece of paperwork.”

“Congratulations. I’m... I’m happy to hear that.” She could hear the awkwardness between the two of them. It had a decibel level. 

Kaidan looked from her to mama. “I have some friends waiting on me down near the Dark Star.” He sounded to be attempting to repress an attitude of ‘you’re not one of them’ to her mother. The attempt made her smile at him as he looked back to her. “It was nice to meet you.”

His sincerity came through to her. “Nice to meet you.” As he walked off, she looked to her mother. “Why doesn’t he like you, mama?” she asked, keeping her voice soft out of respect.

Her mother got a faraway look as she thought over the question. “We had a... falling out years ago. Regarding... someone very close.” Mama had that sound in her voice, the indication that she was on the verge of tears. Mama only sounded that way when she asked about her father. She chose to let the topic lie. 

***

Kaidan started coming to the reunions. His appearance at them seemed to lessen some of the tension that she saw from her aunts and uncles towards mama, though there was still the undercurrent of something unresolved. 

More years passed and she developed suspicions about who her father was. It explained her mom’s reluctance to talk about it. She just didn’t know what had happened between them. Because she knew that it still pained them all, she never asked her mom or any of the _Normandy_ family, as she’d come to think of them, about it. 

That lasted until she became a teenager. Aunt Sam had come all the way from the London, where she was first officer, to take her on a birthday shopping spree. They hit all the fanciest stores on the Citadel, wringing every last credit out of the Alliance paychecks she’d been saving up.

Finally, she looked to Aunt Sam and couldn’t help but ask. “Aunt Sam, why do Mama and Uncle Kaidan act like they’re in a cold war with each other?” 

“I... It’s a very complicated story.” 

“Aunt Sam, I know you’re trying to avoid the conversation. Stop it. Please. I’m thirteen now, I think I deserve the truth.”

Although she knee-jerked a round of hemming and hawing, Sam finally hung her head, admitting defeat. “All right. You know that they served on the Normandy together on a couple of occasions.” 

“Right. Commander Shepard’s search for Saren Arterius and the Reaper invasion.” 

“Well, during the Reaper invasion, both of them were on the Normandy. And both of them were in love with Commander Shepard.”

She started in surprise. That hadn’t been what she’d expected. She had thought that her mom and Kaidan had been together and had a falling out. But Commander Shepard... “What... what happened?”

“I obviously don’t have all the details, but Commander Shepard chose Kaidan over your mother. I always thought that everything between them was good, but then...”

***

“How could you, mother?!”

“Samantha shouldn’t have told you.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“I... I had a plan. I was going to tell you.”

“When? When I reached maturity? When all of your friends from the Normandy passed away? When I reached the matron stage? The matriarch? On your deathbed? In your will? When, mother?”

“Please, let me explain.”

“Forget it, mother. You can lie to yourself, but you know that by simply having me, you betrayed his trust, betrayed the friendship you had with him. I don’t know how you can look yourself in the mirror, but I can’t look at you without seeing a horrible person, someone more interested in her own happiness, her own desire to have something deeper with a person who considered you a friend, who did something that she always told me was wrong, something that went against everything about our people that we hold dear. The meld is supposed to be a union of genuine emotion, mother! That’s what you always told me. And now I learn that you used that to betray your friend’s trust?” Fire not leaving her eyes, she stalked to the door.

Her mother remained quiet as she walked out.

***

She wound up on Kaidan’s doorstep. He took her in, seeing as she had no other place to go. Quietly, though he put in word to Liara, just so she would be aware. 

It took her a week to finally come to him and ask the burning questions.

“What was my fath... Commander Shepard like?” 

There was a long moment of silence as Kaidan collected his thoughts. “Shepard... Even to those of us who served with him, who knew him as a man, he was like a god. When he went out on a mission, when we went with him, we knew, implicitly, he’d bring us home. There was nothing that we couldn’t do with him leading us. We wanted to be there with him, because we believed in him.”

She wanted to ask him about who the person was, not the legend, but she could recognize that he was building to it, that he was talking about something that he didn’t normally.

He closed his eyes, a soft smile forming as he reminisced. “Shepard... he’d lost so much, his father to a batarian raid, his unit on Akuze... And those were before everything with the Reapers. I... I loved him from those early days, but I didn’t realize it. He was the most caring and compassionate man I’ve ever known.” Kaidan chuckled softly. “A lot of people mistook him being nice for him flirting with them. I know it got him into trouble a couple of times. And it wasn’t something that he did intentionally. He just... he thought everyone deserved to be treated like they mattered. It was hard not to fall in love with that. I just wish we’d realized it sooner. We both... focused so much on the mission during the hunt for Saren, we didn’t have the opportunity to think about what could happen between us.”

“And... him and my mother?”

“He rescued her from a geth attack. She was a scared kid. She may have been over a century old, but she struck all of us as being not much more than a kid, in human terms, probably about eighteen or so.” He laughed slightly at the comment. “I know it’s pretty human-centric to apply human development to asari, but...” When she didn’t say anything, he cleared his throat to continue. “Anyway, it was obvious to everyone that she had a crush on Shepard. From what I saw he did try to convince her that there wasn’t going to be anything between them. I thought it had worked, but...” He cut himself off, the anger starting to burn back through the veneer of politeness. She almost told him that she didn’t mind him saying horrible things about her, that she’d probably thought them all herself.

After a moment, he composed himself, shoving the emotions back down into the dark spaces of his mind. “Anyway, after we dealt with Saren... I think Shepard and I were... becoming closer, about to get a chance to... air it all out and get it all figured out. But then...”

“The Collector attack.” The practical matters, Shepard’s reported death and his subsequent holding by Cerberus, were fairly well known, at least amongst those who attended the _Normandy_ reunions. 

He nodded. “Yeah. The crew split apart after that, and... then your mother learned about the Collectors trying to get their hands on Shepard’s body. She fought to recover it from the agents of the Shadow Broker, working for the Collectors... and then she was contacted by Cerberus, who wanted to bring him back. She agreed.”

“Because she couldn’t let him go and they were offering her a chance to have him back?”

“It’s more complicated than that. Yes, I imagine her feelings for Shepard had a part to play in it, but remember, at the time we were the only ones who knew about the Reapers, and Shepard was the only one who’d actually experienced the prothean beacon on Eden Prime. Shepard... If Shepard hadn’t been brought back, I don’t think we would have ever been able to defeat the Reapers.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t excuse it. Cerberus-”

“You don’t think all of us, Shepard included, had this conversation with her a thousand times over? We asked, we talked, we shouted, and eventually, we made our peace with her decision. But the reason that your mother and I... haven’t spoken unless we’ve had to since... the invasion... is because of... Well, her using Shepard to impregnate herself with you.”

That had been what Aunt Sam had said. But hearing it again still hurt. There had been a great number of orphans or single-parented families after the Reaper invasion, of course, and as a little girl, she’d always thought that her father had been a soldier who hadn’t made it through. Then, when she’d believed that Kaidan Alenko was her father, she’d assumed that it had been her mother’s decision to raise her daughter by the asari way, rather than the human fashion, whatever that might be, had driven them apart. Mother had said that non-asari fathers often had difficulties when being excluded from the lives of their daughters. Because of that, she hadn’t pushed or prodded Kaidan for answers at the reunions out of respect for the decision she believed he had made and not wanting to reopen old wounds. 

“I think I understand why you hate her for it, but...” She needed to hear the words for herself. 

“I loved Shepard. I don’t even know if I realized how much until... until he didn’t come back. To lose him like that... And then to learn that Liara, who had clearly never stopped having feelings for him, had impregnated herself without his permission... I lost it. I was pissed off, told her to stay out of my life.”

“Which she did. Until we met on the Citadel.”

He smiled at her. “That we did. I don’t know what it was, but... for a moment, when I looked at you... I saw him. I... I know it’s crazy, but... It seemed like he was alive again.”

She was silent a moment, wondering how much of Shepard Kaidan really saw in her, and whether that was the only reason that he had taken her in. Even as the thought crossed her mind, she knew that it was unfair to Kaidan – he had taken her in because he was responsible that way, and when the teenaged daughter of someone he knew showed up on his doorstep, having run away from home, he would take them in, no questions asked.

After some consideration, she looked to him quizzically. “Do you still hate her?”

“We’re... strained. I don’t know if I’d say that I hate her – hate can’t sustain itself without destroying you - but... I do feel that she violated Shepard’s trust and friendship by doing what she did without his permission. And... there might have been some... jealousy, that she got to have a physical and tangible reminder of Shepard, while all I had left to me are my memories.” He paused for a beat, then, as if he couldn’t take the seriousness of the moment, let out a soft laugh. “Well, my memories and that crap Shepard VI people keep trying to peddle.”

Having seen more than a few merchants attempting to pass off the poorly programed VI in the form of the legendary Commander Shepard, she understood him entirely. 

“So... Where does that leave... everything?”

He was silent for a moment, considering everything. “I’m more than willing to let you stay here as long as you feel you need to. But I am going to tell your mother.”

“My mother...” she spat, disgusted at the thought of ever going back to her. “How can you forgive her? For violating Shepard? For not respecting you? For-?”

“I can forgive her because she gave birth to you. I can forgive her because I don’t want to spend to rest of my life angry. And I can forgive her because... because I know that Shepard would. He forgave people far less deserving than her. I knew Shepard, probably better than anyone. And, yeah, he’dve been pissed to learn that she did that to him without his permission. But he wouldn’t have let it stop him from being a part of your life. As painful as the breach of his trust would be, I know that Shepard would have eventually found it in himself to let go of the feelings of violation. For your sake.”

She was silent, considering what he’d said.

***

She remained with him for several years, enjoying getting the chance to learn about both her father and the man who she was rapidly looking to as a father figure. Although she knew that he kept in touch with her mother, she kept out of it. She had heard his words about holding on to anger, but she couldn’t help but feel a red hot flash of anger every time she thought about it. Maybe it was her one-eighth krogan at work.

As she got older, she started expressing even more independence, though she still respected Kaidan, even coming to acknowledge him as the father she had lost the chance to know. And through him, she gained knowledge and understanding of her father. She wished she could have known Shepard. Just being around Kaidan told her something very important – why he found love with Kaidan, rather than her mother. Where her mother was shy and quiet, Kaidan, though reserved, was more outgoing. Get a few drinks in him, he was positively boisterous. And he had a subtle yet wicked sense of humor. But he was also gentle, kind, and caring, compassionate, willing to do what he needed to, willing to put aside what he wanted for what was right. She hoped that he wasn’t a dying breed and that she could find someone out there one day like him. 

In the time that passed, she started driving. On her first flight, she had Kaidan with her. 

“I never knew the ability to drive was genetic...” he’d muttered when he finally let go of the dash, ten minutes after she’d come to a stop. He looked to her and just barely summoned a smile. “You are definitely Shepard’s daughter.”

To her, it was the highest compliment. 

She knew that at her graduation from primary education (what humans called high school, though she’d never understood that, given that the students were never as far off the ground as businessmen on the Citadel trade floor), her mother would be there. Still, her mother showed the courtesy not to seek her out. Despite her desire to invite her whole extended family, Kaidan talked her out of it, pointing out that there were likely going to be logistical nightmares in inviting the most well-known heroes of the Reaper invasion to a public event. She limited herself to Uncle Kaidan and Aunt Sam, the latter of whom was recording this for the others. 

After the ceremony, she saw Kaidan and her mother speaking. Although she would rather not associate with her mother, she knew that here, she might very well have to. Knowing Kaidan, he would probably want to push the two into a conversation about everything. Still, she could put it off as long as possible.

“She’s a wonderful girl, Liara. You should be proud.”

“I would be if it were because of me. But I know that, despite carrying her, raising her... Everything that’s good about her is because of Shepard.”

“You’re selling yourself short, Liara.”

“Am I? What kind of person does what I did to Shepard? I... Even though I love her, I hate myself for what I did.”

_You’re a little late with the recriminations now, mother..._

“You do have me there, Liara. Shepard would have been pissed. At first, anyway. But he would have come around after meeting her.”

“He would have done right by her, saying that she had no control over the circumstances of her birth. But there’s no way he would have forgiven me. I should never have done it.”

“You’re right, Liara. You did break Shepard’s trust. None of us argued that. But that doesn’t mean that she didn’t get anything from you.”

“I hope you’re wrong, Kaidan. Every day I realize that I’m hoping that she doesn’t take after me at all, that she will stay away from me for the rest of her life. Because she was right about what I did to Shepard. It was wrong and selfish of me. I couldn’t accept the fact that he didn’t love me. I wanted to just pretend. But having her close... Seeing everything in her that I loved and respected in Shepard... It made me realize how wrong it was for me to do that, to him, to her, to you... Kaidan, I don’t want your forgiveness. I think I’d even prefer it if she hated me forever.”

“You don’t mean that, Liara. And even if you did, she’s still your daughter. Some part of her still loves you, will always love you. And the two of you have several years yet to talk it out.”

She thought his words were pretty optimistic. She swore that she didn’t love someone who could do what her mother had done. Even though her mother was now talking about how she had done the wrong thing and that she believed as much. It was just too little too late. She wasn’t going to let her mother walk right back into her life so easily. She had done the unforgiveable. Why should the fact that this was her mother let her forgive what she had done?

“Whatever ultimately happens between the two of us... I did want you to know that I’m very glad that we’ve managed to speak to each other again. I was certain that our friendship was broken beyond repair.”

For a moment, Kaidan was quiet. “I don’t necessarily say that it’s been repaired, Liara. But I don’t think Shepard would want us to spend the rest of our lives... or at least MY life, resenting each other. I got Shepard, you got to have his legacy.”

Her mother shook her head. “I have a daughter. The galaxy... that’s his legacy. The simple fact that we are able to have this conversation is Shepard’s legacy.” She looked to Kaidan, tears in her eyes. “I loved Shepard as an ideal, as something to strive for. You loved him. And... I couldn’t accept it. That was why I did it. I wouldn’t trade her for anything, not even Shepard, but... Goddess, how I wish that I had been honest with Shepard, that she wasn’t... born from a lie.” She started crying then, and Kaidan, always the gentle soul, pulled her close in a friendly embrace.

Somehow, that was what pulled her towards the two, her feet moving of their own accord, bringing her to her mother and Kaidan. Tears were falling free from her eyes as well as her mother’s as her arms came around to embrace them both.

It wasn’t forgiveness. Not yet. But it was a start.


End file.
